crushing burden that I won’t take up again. And now I have to return to Wolfsegg immediately. And under what circumstances, what awful circumstances! I said to myself. Less than four hours earlier I had told Gambetti I would rather not visit Wolfsegg again. It had become intolerable, I had told him. The whole place is a lie, Gambetti, I had said, dominated by an unendurable artificiality that you can’t imagine. These people are deaf to everything that means so much to me, to nature, to art, to anything of real importance. They don’t read, they don’t listen to music, and all day long they talk only about the most futile and banal things. One can’t have a worthwhile conversation with them — only the most depressing one. Whatever I say, they don’t understand me. If I try to explain something to them, they stare at me with a total lack of interest. They don’t have the slightest taste. If I talk about Rome, which is after all the center of the world, it bores them. And the effect is the same if I talk about Paris, or about literature or painting. I can’t mention a single name that’s important to me without being afraid that they’ve never heard it. Everything there is paralyzing, and somehow it’s cold even in summer, so that I always feel frozen. You don’t realize, Gambetti, that these people have nothing on their minds but the most basic concerns — money, hunting, vegetables, grain, potatoes, wood, coal, nothing else. My mother goes on about her stocks and is always saying that she’s made the most disastrous investments. The word warehouse is always on my father’s lips. My brother thinks the world revolves around his sailboat and his Jaguar. And just imagine: the people who visit them are always the most awful people — stupid, ridiculous, dreary people from those dreadful small towns, people with whom one can’t have the slightest conversation. One can’t broach a single topic without coming to an immediate halt. If possible I won’t go back to Wolfsegg for another year, I had told Gambetti, not even for Christmas. That’s another habit that has become repugnant to me, because it’s at Christmas that the mendacity at Wolfsegg reaches its peak. I won’t go to Wolfsegg for at least a year. If I go at all, it’ll be for my father’s birthday, I said, as we stood in front of the Hotel Hassler. This time too I took flight from Wolfsegg and hurt their feelings, I said, though it’s not really possible to hurt their feelings, as they don’t have any. The insensitivity that prevails there defies description, Gambetti. I now find everything Austrian unendurable, and everything German too. Rome has spoiled me for Wolfsegg, I said. Rome has made Wolfsegg impossible. My taste for Wolfsegg was ruined first by London, then by Oxford, then by Paris, and finally by Rome. I don’t know how I could ever have had a bad conscience when I refused to go to Wolfsegg just because they wanted me to, for they didn’t deserve that I should ever go there again — or fly there, I said — and thereby put myself at a disadvantage. I always put myself in the wrong just by turning up at Wolfsegg. I would turn up and immediately be in the wrong. No sooner had I arrived than I put myself at a disadvantage. Everything there is mean and vulgar, I said, if I exclude the few moments I can describe as endurable. Talking to Gambetti, I had worked myself into a state of immense indignation against Wolfsegg. This angry tirade suddenly struck me as utterly perverse and insupportable, but I could not call a halt to it; I had to give it free rein, as I was so overjoyed at being back in Rome. Never before had I been so elated. Unable to restrain myself, I made Gambetti the hapless victim of my tirade against Wolfsegg, which turned into a tirade against everything Austrian, then everything German, and finally everything Central European. I find that the north has become quite unbearable, Gambetti, I said. The farther north I go, the more unbearable it becomes, and to me Wolfsegg lies in the far north. It’s the ultimate dim Thule. Those endless boring evenings, I said, that tasteless food, those undrinkable wines, those labored conversations, which are so excruciating that I can’t describe them to you — I’m just not up to it, my dear Gambetti. You’ve no idea what it means to me to be back in Rome, to be on the Pincio again, to see the Borghese Gardens, to look down from here on my beloved Rome. My revered Rome. My wonderful Rome! Anyone who’s been in Rome as long as I have has simply blocked off all access to a place like Wolfsegg. He can’t go back — it’s become an impossibility. For days I walk around in the various buildings at Wolfsegg, trying to calm myself, and I can’t. For days I walk up and down in my rooms, hoping I’ll be able to endure it, and of course it becomes less and less endurable. For days I try to find ways of surviving at Wolfsegg without constantly feeling that I’ll go mad, but I find none. Five libraries, I said, and such hostility to the intellect! In the Latin countries even the simplest people have some taste, some culture, I said, but at Wolfsegg no one has even a modicum of taste. The Austrians don’t have the slightest taste, or haven’t had for a long time. Wherever you look, tastelessness reigns supreme. And a total lack of interest in everything — as though the stomach were all-important and the mind quite superfluous, I said. Such a stupid people, I said, and such a magnificent country — an incomparably beautiful country. Natural beauty such as you find nowhere else, and a people that has so little interest in it. Such a wonderful age-old culture, and such a barbarous absence of culture today, a devastating anticulture. To say nothing of the dire political conditions. What ghastly creatures rule Austria today! The lowest of the low are now on top. The basest, most revolting people are in power, busily engaged in destroying everything that means anything. Fanatical destroyers are at work, ruthless exploiters who have donned the mantle of socialism. The government operates a monstrous demolition plant that functions nonstop, destroying everything I hold dear. Our towns and cities have become unrecognizable, I said. Great tracts of our countryside have been despoiled. The most beautiful regions have fallen victim to the greed and power-lust of the new barbarians. Wherever there’s a beautiful tree it’s cut down, wherever there’s a fine old house it’s demolished, wherever a delightful brook runs down a hillside it’s ruined. Everything beautiful is trampled under foot. And all in the name of socialism, with the most appalling hypocrisy one can imagine. Anything even remotely connected with culture is suspect, called into question, and obliterated. The obliterators are at work — the killers. We’re up against obliterators and killers, who go about their murderous business everywhere. The obliterators and killers are killing and obliterating the towns, killing and obliterating the landscape. Sitting on their fat arses in thousands and hundreds of thousands of offices in every corner of the state, they think of nothing but obliteration and killing, of how to kill and obliterate everything between the Neusiedlersee and Lake Constance. Vienna has been almost done to death, and Salzburg — all these fine cities, Gambetti, which you don’t know but which are actually among the most beautiful in the world. The landscape we see as we drive through Austria from Vienna has been almost totally killed and obliterated. One eyesore succeeds another, one monstrosity after another forces itself on our eyes. It’s become a perverse lie to say that Austria is a beautiful country. The truth is that the country was destroyed long ago, deliberately devastated and disfigured as a result of perfidious business deals, so that one is hard put to find a single unspoiled spot. It’s a lie to say that Austria is a beautiful country, because the truth is that the country has been murdered. Was it necessary in this century, I asked Gambetti, for humanity to lay violent hands on this most beautiful of all worlds, to kill and obliterate it? The villages, Gambetti, are unrecognizable when we revisit them after a number of years, and so are the inhabitants. What were these people like just a few years ago, and what are they like now? A chronic lack of character has taken hold of them like a deadly disease — greed, ruthlessness, depravity, mendacity, hypocrisy, baseness. They’ll do anything to achieve their base ends, and they employ the utmost ruthlessness in pursuing them. You enter these villages, delighted at the prospect of seeing them again, but you soon turn your back on them, repelled by so much baseness. You visit these once beautiful towns and cities, but by the time you leave them you’re depressed by the crushing certainty that all these towns and cities are lost — disfigured and destroyed by the new barbarism. In order to find them you have to consult old books and engravings, for they have long since been obliterated by the reality of today. All those splendid houses in Upper Austria, in Salzburg, for instance, as well as in Lower Austria, have lost their faces. Their handsome, centuries-old faces have been disfigured by today’s insane fashions. Everything beautiful has been ripped out, so that now, utterly mutilated, they stare scornfully at the horrified visitor who remembers them as they once were. Nothing but ruined facades, I told Gambetti. It’s as if all these towns and cities had been visited by a hideous plague, a deadly disease unknown in earlier times. What’s more, I told Gambetti, whole sections of the towns have been eviscerated and mutilated. The surface of the earth has been disfigured by architects, egged on and abetted by cynical politicians. At first it seemed as though our towns and our countryside had been ravaged by war, but they have suffered far greater ravages during the perverse peace that followed, thanks to the unscrupulous deals done by our rulers and the activities of their henchmen, the architects, who were given unlimited license. And what havoc the architects have wrought in these decades! The destruction we suffered in the war is mild by comparison, I told Gambetti. And in no country has the work of destruction been carried out with such horrendous efficiency as in Austria. Or so unscrupulously. The nation has been hoodwinked; the country and its cities have been mutilated and virtually obliterated, I said. For decades the utmost tastelessness has been preached and propagated. Among our rulers we have had so many unscrupulous profiteers, so many obliterators of our state, and hence of our country, that it doesn’t bear thinking about; they all held on to their cabinet seats long enough to promote and carry through the destruction and annihilation of our landscape and our cities. But in a country where vulgarity and tastelessness prevail it’s no wonder that the results are so ubiquitously shattering. For while these people were in power, destroying, despoiling,